Search Results for: get data type of column field

One of the common tasks requested by our support customers is to optimize slow queries. We normally ask for the table structure(s), the problematic query and sample data to be able to reproduce the problem and resolve it by modifying the query, table structure, or global/session variables. Sometimes, we are given access to the server […]

A question often comes when talking about indexing: should we use multiple column indexes or multiple indexes on single columns? Peter Zaitsev wrote about it back in 2008 and the conclusion then was that a multiple column index is most often the best solution. But with all the recent optimizer improvements, is there anything different with […]

This post was initially going to be two sets of polls: “What is the maximum number of columns in MySQL?” and “What is the minimum maximum number of columns in MySQL?”. Before you read on, ponder those questions and come up with your own answers… and see if you’re right or can prove me wrong! […]

Have you wanted to compress only certain types of columns in a table while leaving other columns uncompressed? While working on a customer case this week I saw an interesting problem where a table had many heavily utilized TEXT fields with some read queries exceeding 500MB (!!), and stored in a 100GB table. In this […]

Here is nice gotcha which I’ve seen many times and which can cause just a minefield for many reasons. Lets say you had a system storing articles and you use article_id as unsigned int. As the time goes and you see you may get over 4 billions of articles you change the type for article_id […]

Quite commonly in the applications you would need to use some kind of “status” field – status of order – “new”, “confirmed”, “in production”, “shipped” status of job, message etc. People use variety of ways to handle them often without giving enough thought to the choice which can cause problems later. Perhaps worst, though quite […]

Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present […]

This is yet another story of Django web-framework with time zone support and pain dealing with python datetimes and MySQL on the backend. In other words, offset-naive vs offset-aware datetimes. Shortly, more about the problem. After reading the official documentation about the time zones, it makes clear that in order to reflect python datetime in […]

Some time ago, Peter Zaitsev posted a blog titled “How well does your table fits in innodb buffer pool?” He used some special INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables developed for Percona Server 5.1 to report how much of each InnoDB table and index resides in your buffer pool. As Peter pointed out, you can use this view into […]

Performance Schema (P_S) has been available since MySQL 5.5, more than 4 years ago. It is still difficult to see production servers with P_S enabled, even with MySQL 5.6 where the feature is enabled by default. There have been several complaints like the overhead, that the fix is a work in progress, and the ease […]